Kitwe to Katumbi

railway to Dar es Salaam on one of the ‘short cuts’ – stopping for cattle herds is common on the bush roads

kids playing in the rubble of a roadworks site – we had to change our route at this point road works birds aren’t used to vehicles this far into the bush no comment… our Land Cruiser has a sun roof which makes for a great picture taking position there was a LOT of this side mirror selfie we weren’t going as fast as it looks here – we averaged between 40-60km p/h in the very remote areas as the locals aren’t used to vehicle and a lot of them run out into the road to investigate you but the animals run away from the vehicles

some are scared of the camera, others love it and strike a pose for us one of my favourite sunsets

over the Christmas/new year holiday we did a road trip from Kitwe, in Zambia, down through Malawi and back to Kitwe again.

we chose to use the little known border post of Katumbi, in the north of Malawi, and then work our way down along Lake Malawi, and back out via Chipata. the roads are pretty bad on the Zambian side but it was a great 4×4 challenge with our Land Cruiser – nerve wracking in the best way.

it took us about 16hrs on the road (we slept one night in a super dodgy ‘lodge’ a few hours before the border) and although we used a friend’s GPS to help guide us, we had to do a lot of guess work as quite a few of the ‘roads’ (basically just dirt tracks in the bush) we traveled didn’t exist, according to the GPS’s maps…

if you have a 4×4, a GPS, and don’t mind being almost permanently out of cell phone signal range, then this is a great route to take. the Katumbi border post is TINY. there isn’t even a border post on the Zambian side, probably because it is hardly ever used. because there’s no traffic, the passport and vehicle export process is quite speedy (as ‘speedy’ as things get in Africa…) and the Malawian’s are probably the most genuinely friendly African’s we have met so far.